No going back: A review of the literature on sustaining organizational change

Why do some organizational changes persist, while others decay? The sustainability of change can be defined broadly as the process through which new working methods, performance goals and improvement trajectories are maintained for a period appropriate to a given context. However, sustainability has received limited attention, although the concept reflects Lewin's concern with ‘refreezing’ ( Lewin. K. 1951 . Field Theory in Social Science: Selected Theoretical Papers by Kurt Lewin, UK edition published 1952, ed. D. Cartwright, London: Tavistock). In an uncertain environment, working practices that fail to adapt are targets for change, and stability has been regarded not as a condition to be achieved, but as a symptom of inertia, a problem to be solved. This paper reviews the emerging literature, seeking to develop a provisional model of the processes influencing change sustainability and decay, as a platform for further research. This review suggests that sustainability is dependent on multiple factors, at different levels of analysis: substantial, individual, managerial, financial, leadership, organizational, cultural, political, processual, contextual and temporal. The relative significance of those factors cannot be determined a priori, raising questions concerning the properties of the sustainability process with regard to different types of change in different contexts.     

The teaching of business policy—A fresh approach

The artificiality of the circumstances in which much of management education takes place is exemplified in the teaching of business policy where the missing ingredient of responsibility is most crucial. The use of ready made cases compounds this problem by presenting the student with a partly identified problem and the information he must use in tackling it. A different approach in which students prepare their own studies of named companies and discuss their analysis and proposals with senior executives from those companies reduces to a worthwhile degree the artificiality of much business policy teaching. This paper discusses the problems of teaching in this field and describes an approach using the method described above.     

‘Recovery’ after age 7 from ‘externalising’ behaviour problems: the role of risk and protective clusters

This study uses data from the National Child Development Study (NCDS) to track behaviourally disturbed children at 7 through to adolescence in order to assess the extent to which clusters of protective factors can offset the negative effects of clusters of risk factors. Behavioural measures at ages 7, 11 and 16 from NCDS were used to identify children with ‘externalising’ behaviour problems. Children whose scores fell into the top 20% of Rutter ‘A’ scores at 7 but not at age 11 and 16 were deemed to have ‘recovered’. Controlling for gender, social class, family structure, parental mental health, domestic tension at age 7 and a cluster of protective factors in childhood (high reading skills at 11, father's interest in child's education at 16, good relations with parents at 16, good school attendance at 16), a cluster of risk factors present as the child grew up (clumsiness, social services involvement, family involvement with police/probation, family mobility at 7) was significantly associated with lack of recovery from behavioural problems. Although individual protective factors were significantly associated with recovery in the bivariate analysis, their power was not strong enough in the multivariate model to overcome the strength of the risk factors.     

Mixed Results, Lousy Process: the Management Experience of Organizational Change

This paper reports the findings of a survey of 92 managers, from 14 public and 14 private-sector organizations. The aim was to explore the experience of change, extending the findings of a previous study (Buchanan, Claydon and Doyle, 1999). The survey addressed six themes: communication, evaluation, learning, attitudes and relationships, implementation and change and continuity. Overall, the results present a bleak picture of the process and outcomes of contemporary change. Most managers claim that change responsibility affords valuable personal learning. However, recent change has also been accompanied by stress, work intensification, command and control and management–employee distrust. A comparison of public and private–sector responses suggests that the experience of change in the public sector has been more pressured than in the private sector. Comparison of responses by management level indicates that senior managers are more likely to hold positive views of the change process and its outcomes. Explanations for these differences in experience and perception are considered, along with the implications. It is concluded that an adequate theory of organizational change must address the contradictions and tensions in the lived experience of those implicated, and that effective practice should consider the linkage of change implementation with organizational learning mechanisms which, on this evidence, are absent.